Marriage and Caste in
America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age

"Marriage and Caste in America
is the best single book on the damage being done to our nation by
the explosion of divorce and nonmarital births since the 1960s.
Beginning with the widely ignored fact that it is minorities and
the poor who are disproportionately affected by family breakdown,
this provocative book presents a disturbing tale of cultural meltdown.
Reading it is like reading a cultural obituary."

A generation ago Americans undertook a revolutionary experiment to redefine
marriage. Where historically men and women had sought a loving bond, largely
centered on the rearing of children, the new arrangement called for an
intimateand provisionalunion of two adults. Now, as Kay
Hymowitz argues in Marriage and Caste in America, the results
of this experiment separating marriage from childrearing are in, and they
turn out to be bad news not only for children but also, in ways little
understood, for the country as a whole. The family revolution has played
a central role in a growing inequality and high rates of poverty, even
during economic good times. The family upheaval has hit African-Americans
especially hard, Ms. Hymowitz shows, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan had famously
predicted it would. While for decades feminists and academics toyed with
the myth of the strong single black mother supported by kinship networks,
black men drifted into fatherhood without being husbands, without even
becoming part of a family, while black children were left behind. When
Americans began their family revolution, they forgot to consider what
American marriage was designed to do: it ordered lives by giving the young
a meaningful life script. It supported middle-class foresight, planning,
and self-sufficiency. And it organized men and women around "The Mission"
nurturing their children's cognitive, emotional, and physical development.
More than anything, Ms. Hymowitz writes, it is The Mission that separates
middle-class kidswho for all their overscheduling are doing very
well indeedfrom their less-parented and lower-achieving peers.
In fact our great family experiment threatens to turn what the founders
imagined as an opportunity-rich republic of equal citizens into a hereditary
caste society.

About the Author

Kay S. Hymowitz is the author of Liberation's Children and Ready
or Not, and has written extensively on education and childhood in
America in articles for the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Republic,
among other publications. She is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute
in New York City and a contributing editor of City Journal. She
lives in Brooklyn with her husband and three children.